TASS, Russia
April 8 2018
Russian top diplomat says convinced problems in Nagorno-Karabakh settlement are surmountable
MOSCOW April 8
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict can be ultimately settled as all the problems are quite surmountable, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with the Armenian mass media.
MOSCOW, April 8. /TASS/. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict can be ultimately settled as all the problems are quite surmountable, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with the Armenian mass media.
"The most important thing is to drop mistrust which is still surfacing in the talks now and then. It is important to focus of realistic, pragmatic ideas we have in abundance," Lavrov said commenting on the current situation in the settlement process. "All that should be done is to commit them to paper. Conceptually, the sides agree that it must be done, but once it comes to concrete wordings, difficulties emerge, as it may be in other situations."
"I think we will continue efforts to overcome them [difficulties] and will finally reach results," he added.
According to the Russian top diplomat, settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is one of Russia’s priorities on the post-Soviet space. He recalled that active efforts on this track had been taken through 2009-2011 that had been crowned by a series of meetings between the Armenian and Azerbaijani president mediated by the Russian leader.
Even the fact that the Kazan summit in 2011, the final one in the series of contacts, failed to yield an agreement in no way diminishes the importance of the work done. "Extra questions and commentaries surfaced during the summit. Such things do happen. We see no tragedy in that," Lavrov said, adding that efforts would be continues.
Situation around Nagorno-Karabakh
Presidents of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Dmitry Medvedev, Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev, met in Russia’s Kazan on June 24, 2011. The meeting was expected to yield a final agreement on the so-called Madrid principles envisaging granting a transition status to Nagorno-Karabakh to be followed by a plebiscite. However, the sides failed to reach an agreement in Kazan.
The situation in Nagorno-Karabakh deteriorated in April 2016. The presidents of the three countries, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Serzh Sarfsyan of Armenia and Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, met in June 2016 in Russia’s St. Petersburg to try to settle the crisis. The three leaders once again reiterated their commitment to peaceful settlement.
The conflict between neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan over the highland region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory that had been part of Azerbaijan before the Soviet Union break-up but was mainly populated by Armenians, broke out in the late 1980s.
In 1991-1994, the confrontation spilled over into large-scale military action for control over the enclave and some adjacent territories. Thousands left their homes on both sides in a conflict that killed 30,000. A truce was called between Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh republic on one side and Azerbaijan on the other in May 1994.
Talks on Nagorno-Karabakh have been held on the basis of the so-called Madrid Principles suggested by co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, or Russia, France and the United States, in December 2007 in the Spanish capital.